Vivipary

Opening up an apple this morning, I found a germinating pip, not something I remember coming across before. Almost certainly a Pink Lady apple from Sainsbury's, an apple with some external damage and a little, faint internal bruising, but quite OK to eat, if not as good as some of its kind, which can taste remarkably fresh, given the length of time which they must have been in store.

The Sainsbury's product details say they might come from Argentina, Chile, France, Italy, New Zealand or South Africa, and given that reference 1 suggests that storage for 8 months or more is possible, these particular apples could have come from any of those places. Storage which might be at only just above freezing, which I did not know.

Next stop Gemini, with the prompt: 'When do the pips germinate inside a still entirely eatable apple'. His first response what that they don't, giving various reasons why they don't, one of which was the need to keep them cold for a bit (stratification). I then told him that this pip had germinated. He replied that this was called vivipary and might have been because the apple was overripe (which one might have thought was excluded by the wording of my original prompt) or because it had been stored in damp conditions. I then pointed out that this apple had probably been in cold storage for a while. Which he agreed was a necessary condition for germination, but not sufficient, sticking with the overripe or damp story.

Next stop Copilot, with the prompt: 'What are the vivipary triggers for an apple pip'. His response was nicely organised, to the point of supplying references as end notes - with three of the four being gardening sites, of which there seem to be lots. However, Gemini was not having it, saying that potassium and nitrogen had nothing to do with it. Both Gemini and Copilot seemed to think that what I was really interested in was growing apple tree from pips.

Time for a bit of digging on my own account. Which turns up reference 3, introducing vivipary in plants. And then reference 4, a rather more detailed account, with special reference to apples. Which I have not yet read, but the whole business of triggering germination looks to be quite complicated. With a simple fact being that a good way to break seed dormancy is to keep them in the cold - while a good way to promote subsequent germination is to keep them in the warm. Maybe keeping them in cold storage and then transferring them to one's fruit bowl on the sideboard is doing just that.

I am reminded that some plants go to some trouble to make it more likely that their seeds will germinate in the right place at the right time. With fire being an essential ingredient in some cases. With deciding the best balance between producing lots of seeds and producing good quality seeds being an interesting problem of constrained optimisation.

I may get to potassium and nitrogen if I persist.

In the meantime, my thought is that Copilot organises its replies well - but they are not any more reliable than Gemini's. While Gemini is inclined to waffle in response to supplementaries - the time-honoured resort of the examination candidate who is stuck for an answer. And neither product really address the point of what might make a pip inside a supermarket apple sprout. 

Neither product appears to be able to drill through the sea of web pages to get to the real stuff, like reference 4, and both are dependent on more or less amateur gardening sites and the likes of Wikipedia. 

Dictionaries

Neither Kew nor Wisley were any help. Kew gave nothing for vivipary in apples, while Wisley gave me far too much. Far too much to wade through and most of which was probably irrelevant.

Webster's has a brief entry for vivipary, while OED has an equally brief one but one which suggests  that vivipary is the term applied to plants which are viviparous - a word which is not restricted to animals - animals like snakes and humans - as I had thought. A word derived from French and/or Latin and which has been around in this country since the 17th century. Viviparous gets about six column inches.

While in 'Brave New World' being viviparous was something disgusting that savages did, before proper hatcheries were invented.

Heritage

There is talk on the Internet of putting apple pips on some damp newspaper in the refrigerator to get them to germinate. After which they may or may not grow to produce the desired apples.

While my father, whose own father grew fruit for a living, never raised apple trees from seed, but always budded, occasionally grafted, them onto a suitable stock. I may have even done the odd budding myself in the distant past and I inherited - and still have - the specialised pocket knife used by the professional budder.

PS 1: I think the house my father was born in in Hemingford Gray is the one in the snap above - a village which he was pleased to remember as a rural slum - but then he was a bit of a leftie. The house is looking rather smarter than when I knew it (from the outside, it having been sold out of the family), complete with fake dormers and now dignified with the name 'Orchard House', with the orchard itself having long gone for housing. Google Image Search has a fair stab at finding houses of this general appearance, but does not manage to run this particular one down!

PS 2: since writing this, I have learned that our government has so managed things that the factories slated to make the shiny new HS2 trains might close down for lack of work before they get around to them. Free market forces have been busy again.

References

Reference 1: ‘Pink Lady’ Apple - J.E.L. Cripps, L.A. Richards, A.M. Mairata - 1993.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cripps_Pink.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivipary.

Reference 4: Metabolic control of embryonic dormancy in apple seed: seven decades of research - Stanisław Lewak - 2011. The view from Poland.